Elon Musk shows photos of assembled Falcon Heavy rocket at launch site

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, has posted three photos of the Falcon Heavy rocket online. The rocket is almost fully assembled and ready to be docked at the Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. The launch will take place sometime in January.

It is the first time that the Falcon Heavy rocket is on display in assembled form. The photos that Elon Musk posted on Twitter, show that the three parts are linked together. Only the top stage, containing the payload, is still missing.

Falcon Heavy actually consists of three Falcon 9 boosters. They are each equipped with 9 Merlin engines, bringing the total to 27 units. The photos indicate which boosters SpaceX will use for the first Falcon Heavy launch. According to research by Reddit users, the boosters on either side are copies previously used for Falcon 9 launches. The middle one is a new one.

Musk claimed in early December in a tweet that the payload of the first Falcon Heavy launch will consist of its own Tesla Roadster and that it will play the song Space Oddity. The goal of the first mission is to send the payload into an orbit around the sun, which is similar to that of Mars.

A launch date for Falcon Heavy has not yet been announced, but the large rocket is expected to launch sometime in January 2018. The goal is for the three boosters to land again; the middle one will have to do that on the sea platform ‘of course I still love you’. The two outer boosters return to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.